Black on Black

TEN YEARS AGO, Jonathan Kozol '58, Harvard Graduate and Rhodes Scholar, got a job teaching black fourth graders in the then segregated Boston public school system and was fired for having his class read a poem by Langston Hughes. The poem, he was informed, was not on the approved reading list, and the school department was not of a mind to allow teachers to determine what was to pass for education.

His account of those experiences, Death at an Early Age, won the National Book Award, became a classic among educational reformers and made him something of a celebrity among the radical/liberal intelligentsia. One factor in the book's popularity, which pictured the Boston school machine as caring little for teachers and teaching, and even less for students, was Kozol's obvious and unaffected compassion: he cared intensely for his students and felt moral outrage at the barbarities of the schools.

The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home is similarly filled with moral outrage, but unfortunately, that is about all it offers. The book is a rambling critique of modern American society that finds brutality, inhumanity and just plain ugliness practically everywhere, and Kozol seems more intent on arousing feelings of guilt in his readers than on attempting to understand or analyze the problems he finds. In the first chapter he says he hopes he will provoke "pain and anguish" in the consciousness of the reader, and he has clearly put a lot of effort into writing a depressing book. The mood of the book--a pervasive feeling that Kozol is facing the apocalypse, alone, abandoned by all his liberal friends from Somerville--often seems more important to Kozol than the content. The book seems somewhat more akin to Joseph Heller's Something Happened than to works of social science or social criticism, for both rely on waves of unrelenting pessimism to make their impact. In a novel, you can accept a lack of analysis, but in the social sciences, unadorned pessimism isn't enough.

THE BEST DEVELOPED part of the book describes the role modern schools play as protectors of social order. Kozol tells us that the first objective of public schooling is the perpetuation of the American value system, that history texts fail to deal with American imperialism so future soldiers will be willing and able to fight in future Vietnams and that the poverty and pain in the lives of many Americans is ignored so good solid citizens will be insulated form feelings of compassion for those who suffer. He also describes the slow process of destruction of the human spirit that takes place after years of subjugation to demoralizing authority relationships and the sheer boredom of school: in one of the few moments of levity in the book, he writes that the person produced by the schools "At worst...will be somebody like Moynihan. At best he may be somebody like Galbraith. There is no danger he will be Thorean."

All of this rings true, but it has been ringing true for the past decade in works of greater sensitivity and better detail. Kozol offers neither a new approach to the problem, nor new evidence. In fact, he seems to feel little obligation to base any of his conclusions on evidence, and relies instead on instinct. This weakens Kozol's effort, for the most convincing chapter in the book is one based on his own observations and experience in free schools. He argues that "open" schools can be just as politically indoctrinating as traditional schools, and are all the more dangerous because they bill themselves, and are perceived to be progressive. Kozol's insight surfaces when he is playing the role of social investigator, not polemicist.

When he is not writing about education, Kozol scatters himself all over the social and political terrain of modern America, touching on many of the well-worn bases of American ignominy. We are callous ("Death, murder, exploitation is not credible."), especially the wealthy ("The rich man carves his beefsteak with impunity because he first applies the knifeblade to his brain."); nobody is willing to take responsibility anymore ("Businesses incorporate themselves with somewhat the same goal: in order to achieve immunity from consequences of their own behavior.") Kozol weaves back and forth, often repeating his arguments. The result is not enlightment by repetition, but sheer overkill.

MUCH OF THIS BOOK'S criticism is political, but Kozol has no distinct political or theoretical position. He leans to the left, but never identifies his ideological beliefs: it is impossible to tell whether deep down inside, he is a closet social democrat, Maoist, or, what seems to fit best with his style of wholesale criticism, anarchist. It is difficult to discern the underlying basis of Kozol's critique--or to discover if he has one at all--for he fails to offer solutions to the problems he describes in such detail. In the closing paragraphs of the book, Kozol lets on that he is in the process of writing another book, a battle plan for people working to fight "the process of indoctrination" within the U.S. public schools, a work he hopes will be in print within the year. Anticipating the criticism he correctly guessed he would receive in response to this book, he writes that readers should not blame him simply because he does not tell them what to do. "Demolition workers are not asked to be good architects as well," he writes.

Maybe so. But when the demolition is done with so little finesse, something more is needed. Perhaps judgement on Kozol the social observer/social activist should be withheld until his next book appears. But to succeed, the new book will have to be many times more perceptive than The Night is Dark, and will also have to explain why he wrote this anomalous, unenlightening book.